Home-Spun Artists: Historical Sketches — N. C. Wyeth

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945)
American Artist and Illustrator

N.C. Wyeth grew up in New England and as a child developed a love of nature.

My brothers and I were brought up on a farm, and from the time I could walk I was conscripted into doing every conceivable chore that there was to do about the place. This early training gave me a vivid appreciation of the part the body plays in action. Now, when I paint a figure on horseback, a man plowing, or a woman buffeted by the wind, I have an acute bodily sense of the muscle-strain, the feel of the hickory handle, or the protective bend of head and squint of eye that each pose involves.

Wyeth’s mother encouraged his early artistic talents, but his father preferred that he pursue the more practical trade of drafting. At age 20, Wyeth began studying under Howard Pyle where he learned Pyle’s rule of painting from experience, rather than the standard endless routine of copying from the classic plaster cast and drawing from the model. Pyle sought to teach his students to “paint living pictures rather than dead, inert matter in which there was not one single spark of real life.” Within a year of studying with Pyle, Wyeth had his first illustration published — the February, 1903, cover for The Saturday Evening Post (painting of a bronco buster). Over his lifetime, Wyeth produces nearly 4000 artworks for books (including many classics), magazines, calendars, posters, murals, and even maps for the National Geographic Society. Most of his work was done in oils, although the last ten years of his life he worked in egg tempera.

He and his wife Carolyn had five children: Henriette, Carolyn, Nathaniel, Ann, and Andrew. Each of the children became distinguished in their individual careers. Wyeth was an extraordinary and enthusiastic father, always curious. Family was very important to him and he took a personal interest in the training of his children.

We make a great deal of these simple experiences [walking through the countryside with his small children]. I believe them to be the real foundation of one of the most profound ethical ideas in regard to early training, to obtain the utmost of pleasure and inspiration for the simplest and homeliest events of the life about us.

Walks through the countryside were a family habit, with the goal of discovering and exploring the wonders of nature, and Wyeth’s natural curiosity about everything was clearly communicated to his children, which in turn helped to develop their own creativity. Daughter Ann remembers that her father would sit for hours on the front porch studying the changing lights and shadows as they passed over the sea and landscape.

The Wyeths sent their young children to a nearby Montessori school, which at that time was quite a rarity. As the children grew older, and public education proved unacceptable, Wyeth took them out of the formal classroom setting and hired tutors.

Every mother’s son of us is born with that supreme gift of individual perception, but the sheeplike tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child’s unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity.

All five of the Wyeth children were individually tutored and freed from the “menace of all organized schools and colleges.” The Wyeth children’s education was rigorous.

All the ‘natural’ talents of youth cannot take the place of disciplined training. Beethoven was a prodigy as a boy pianist, but witness the infinite and painstaking training which followed his initial flowering. Without this exhaustive discipline we would not have had the Beethoven of the nine symphonies.

Henriette (married Peter Hurd, a student of her father’s), Carolyn, and Andrew worked with their father in his studio for several hours each day and each went on to become well-known artists. Ann (married John W. McCoy, a student of her father’s) studied piano with a tutor and went on to become an artist and composer. Nathaniel’s interests as a boy were in the direction of mechanical structure and he went on to become a design engineer.

Wyeth required his students to study basic geometric forms first, mastering these simple tasks, before moving on to still life and then landscapes. He believed that knowledge came first, then creative interpretation. Wyeth would often advise young artists.

The genuineness of the artist’s work depends upon the genuineness of the artist’s living. In other words, art is not what you do, it is what you are. We cannot in art produce a fraction more than what we are.

Practical application
A good artist is not produced by merely sitting in a room drawing pictures. To encourage the creativity in your young artist, give him experiences from which to draw on: allow him to raise and train animals; make collections of quantities of specimens from nature; observe people, places, and things; work hard; and play freely.

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4 Responses to “Home-Spun Artists: Historical Sketches — N. C. Wyeth”

I just finished reading “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, and N.C.Wyeth did the illustrations. It is a lovely collection of her correspondence to an old friend while she “proved up” on a homestead in the early 1900s. It only has six illustrations, but they are very lovely indeed.
Thanks for Historical Sketches! I really am learning so much from you,
blessings,
Nancy

Interesting site. Would you have any samples of N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations for the 1929 editon of The Odyssey of Homer, George Herbert Palmer, translator? I have not been able learn what the illustrations look like. Thanks. Michael